


Pavlov's Dog

by RiverK



Series: Pavlov's Dog [1]
Category: El Mariachi Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Paralysis, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-02
Updated: 2004-09-02
Packaged: 2020-02-26 01:19:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18713590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverK/pseuds/RiverK
Summary: Once again, in that proud tradition of "what if?" fics, this is a series of vignettes arranged in a semi-linear fashion, following events that never happened.





	Pavlov's Dog

**Author's Note:**

> Imported from LJ. Written in 2004. I was 17, k. I had Issues. Saving it here for posterity.

Okay, so I've been ranting about this fic since June. And now it's September. And I'm only just posting it now. Doi. *emphatic deskslamming* Anyhoo, I've delayed this enough as it is.

**Title:** Pavlov's Dog  
**Pairing:** Sands/Ajedrez  
**Rating:** R  
**Disclaimer:** Hah! I wish!  
**Summary:** Once again, in that proud tradition of "what if?" fics, this is a series of vignettes arranged in a semi-linear fashion, following events that never happened.

 

 

  
-Pavlov’s Dog-

_Daddy, when you’re done with him, can I keep him?_

The drugs make the world shake like an out-of-focus camera in the hands of a spastic teenager. His breath hitches and he tries to swallow, but can’t. The operating table is cold against his cheek and naked chest. The kind of cold that slithers underneath the skin like smoke and settles there. He is face down and strung up, wound tight, twanging taut and loud between the gray and the acid nothing of his body and the gibbering madness in his head. Because something bad is going to happen, and there’s Ajedrezthatbitch, but he’s swimming through blue those fucking drugs fuck them fuck Barillo there he is Ajedrez’s dad oh shit.

Something bad is going to happen.

He doesn’t gasp when the knife slides under and through his skin, through tissue, maneuvering delicately past bone until _SNIP._

And he’s numb.

And nothing hurts anymore.

Sands closes his eyes and sighs long and low. A needle slides in. Something clear trickles into his veins. He doesn’t feel a thing.

Everything melts away.

***

It’s her lips he wakes up to, and he gasps, tries to pull her back in before she disappears. Nothing happens. He opens his eyes.

She smirks at him. “Like Sleeping Beauty,” she says. Bends over and picks up a hand. Grasps a finger. Sands hears the dull snap of breaking bone.

“Feel that? Sugarbutt?”

He realizes then that he has a broken finger.

“Fuck.”

She laughs. “Not something you’re really capable of anymore, Muffincake.”

***

Ajedrez is the new kingpin of the cartels. She wears her authority like an extremely large gun when she reassembles the shards of her father’s empire.

In the bedroom, when she thinks no one is looking, she is very, very small.

Sands is Ajedrez’s new favorite toy. Her talking Ken doll with teeth. Her Raggedy Stan with built-in biting action.

It’s all he has left.

They had severed his spine low enough so that he can breathe independently and digest food, but high enough so that everything from the neck down is completely useless.

Completely.

Fucking.

Useless.

He can’t feel anything from the neck down. He’s on catheter and has been assigned a personal nurse named Raul.

***

Guevara had grinned at him as he picked up Sands’s limp hand. He had prodded the broken finger, hanging awkward and swollen purple-red. He grinned even wider when Sands did not flinch. When Sands, in fact, did not show any indication that he had felt anything at all.

An hour later, after the doctor had left and Sands’s finger was wrapped in gauze and splinted between two stainless steel twigs, the air started to stink of shit. Sands swore loudly.

He had had to endure the smell for two more hours before Raul finally arrived.

***

Raul is young –barely out of his teens, from the looks of him. Too small and skinny to be one of the convalescent cartel’s bully boys, and too stupid to possibly be good for anything but caring for the Boss Lady’s pet cripple.

Raul bathes him. Raul clothes him. Raul brushes his teeth. Raul pushes his wheelchair. Raul wipes up his vomit when taste grows vile in his mouth and the few functioning muscles left in his shriveled body back up. Raul doesn’t look him in the eye.

Nobody looks him in the eye. To everyone but Ajedrez, he is a thing. When he asks for something, they give it to him. When he asks questions, they answer in monosyllables. When he insults them, they pretend not to hear. Only Ajedrez. Ajedrez who laughs and picks him up and plays with his useless limbs the way a big girl would play with her life-sized doll.

But sometimes, she falls asleep in his bed, beside him, her cheeks wet against his neck. And she looks very, very small.

Even though it’s his thumb she has in her mouth and not her own.

It is then that Sands lets himself wonder if killing her wouldn’t be as difficult as it looks.

***

Sands is a thing.

A thing that can’t even kill itself.

God knows, he’s tried. The problem is, when you can’t even hold the gun, how the fuck do you pull the trigger? He has tried to simply stop breathing, but after he passed out, his lungs sucked in a breath on their own. And another. And another. As it turns out, self-suffocation isn’t as easy as it seems. He has also tried refusing the food they would spoon-feed him, but they stuck a needle into his arm and put him on dextrose. Synthetic nourishment fed straight into the vein. He couldn’t feel the needle’s sting, but it didn’t seem worth giving up the taste of tequila and _puerco pibil_ for.

When it comes to small pleasures, Sands knows that beggars can’t be choosers.

***

At exactly eight o’ clock in the morning, Raul comes in to fix him up. Right on schedule. Sands has been awake since six-thirty, drifting between limbo and alertness because he can’t quite get out of bed. The bed’s canopy is dark brown and fringed in deep, blood-burgundy. It is made of velvet and drapes artfully over the bed like a naked whore’s blanket. He had been contemplating the folds in the fabric for over an hour.

“Mornin’, Raul,” he says with mock cheer.

Raul’s gaze flickers up and then returns to the floor. “ _Buenos dias,_ ” he mumbles.

“How’s it going? Still have problems socializing with other human beings, eh? Well don’t stress yourself over me, Raul,” the boy’s gaze flickers up once more when he hears his name. “I’m not really human.”

Raul pushes back the covers and picks him up. Underneath the down comforter, Sands is wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a catheter. His new and improved morning ritual stopped being funny after the first few days. There really isn’t anything very funny about a grown man being dressed and washed like a baby when that grown man is you.

“I’ve kinda become what you call a ‘talking head.’ Sorry I couldn’t put that in air quotes for you, it’s not something I do anymore.” Raul carries him to the divan next to the window and carefully positions him so that he doesn’t fall.

“So anyway, about that talking head thing, since my head is pretty much the only thing I can still actually use, I suppose it’s basically what I’ve become.”

Raul starts working on his right hand: opening and closing the fisted fingers, flexing the wrist. He works his way up, flexing joints and kneading stiff muscles until he reaches the shoulder.

“Although if I really want to split hairs, I guess I’ll have to consider the fact that I’m still technically using my spleen and my lungs and all those other vital organs, but then again, that’s a given.”

Raul switches to Sands’s left hand and repeats the process.

“Basically I’m talking about voluntary muscles. _Lastissimus dorsi, gastrocnemius, rectus abdomini, biceps femoris_ ; things you have to memorize for biology class. Things you’re supposed to be able to move just by wanting them to.”

Raul has a circlet of thorns tattooed around his wrist, like Christ’s crown. Raul has skinny wrists.

“Then again, you probably dropped out before they started on that shit, didn’t you?” Raul looks up and nods automatically. He obviously doesn’t understand a thing. Sands forces a low laugh. “Well, you know what they say, ‘the mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ It’s a good thing they didn’t waste very much on you.”

When Raul is done massaging Sands, he settles him into his wheelchair and wheels him into the bathroom. Again, Raul picks him up. He watches Raul as he lays Sands out on the marble changing table Ajedrez had had built for him. He blocks out the humiliation rising in his throat with one-sided conversation. “Have you ever seen _The Matrix_? Spiffy fight scenes, eh? Personally, I think it’s a crappy trilogy. Overrated. It got too self-indulgent after that first installment. And all that shit about it being the ultimate postmodernist discourse is stupid. I mean, so what do those Ewoks signify? I just think they’re creepy.” A long pause. Raul bites his lip as he works. A thin scar threads across his neck like a barely visible smile. Obviously, death isn’t anything new to him. “Oh, right. The Ewoks are from _Star Wars._ ” Edged laughter slicing the cells in his skin. “Jesus, listen to me. I’m getting my pop culture references crossed. You think you could ask Ajedrez to get me cable? I’m running behind on my soaps. I missed the last episode of _Days of Our Lives_ to come to this pissfuck country, did you know that?”

Raul smiles and nods as he wipes Sands’s ass.

***

She takes him out on a walk. It’s a Saturday. The third one in his private Hell, if his guess is correct. Raul has been dismissed for the moment, and she wheels Sands through the grounds of the Barillo compound. He suspects that she does it more for her own amusement than for his.

“You remember that time when you fucked some other girl behind my back and I caught you with her paws on your dick and your tongue halfway down her windpipe, and I blew the little bitch’s face off?” She plays with his hair, smoothing it down and running light fingernails across his scalp.

“How about the time you promised me that you’d help me with this little coup I’d been planning to set up and then you fucked me over and had my spine sliced? Wasn’t that ever a gas?”

She chuckles and places her hand on his cheek. “Yeah. Those were good times, weren’t they?”

Her voice is soft and smug and mocking. It wafts in the still, mid-afternoon air like poison, mingling with the scent of roses and dust.

Sands wishes fervently that she would spontaneously combust. That he could watch as she screamed and smell her flesh burning. He wishes that he could stand up, grab her throat and crush it, and then gleefully kick her corpse around when it’s all done. Wishes that, at the very least, a passing bird would choose this moment to crap on her nose.

They stop somewhere in the far corner of the gardens.

“Listen,” she says, “let’s play a game.”

He glowers. “I don’t feel like playing.”

Her smile coils around the corners of her eyes like a snake. “You don’t have a choice.”

She undoes the straps that keep him from sliding off the chair and winks at him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” He desperately tries to fend her off, frantically lashing out with biting teeth. She slaps him. A sharp burst of white cuts past through vision. He breathes in and sinks into the pain. Despite himself, he feels a wild relief as the sting lingers in the spreading heat on his cheek.

She is suffused with a hyperactive, manic sort of delight: a high-octane scream radiating from the pores of her skin. She gives the wheelchair a push, and he spills into the grass like a rag doll. He lands facedown, a ridiculous heap of limbs and vitriol. Ajedrez claps her hands and giggles.

“You bitch!” Sands screams at the ground. “You ass-eating, shitbucket bitch!” He curses in English and Spanish, in Swahili and French and Cantonese. The grass smells green and moist, and the barest hint of cordite has leached in.

Sands bites the side of his lip against the tightness in his throat. Something hot pricks the inside of his eyelids, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the scald of tears. “Fuck,” he wrings the oaths from between grit teeth. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” Something hot cuts its acid trail down his face, into the grass. “Fuck.”  
  
Her laughter hooks its talons into his skin.

The choked hiss of a silenced gun discreetly rips the air, and Ajedrez replies in kind. The sound of a falling body and startled shouts. “Come out, you fuck-monkeys,” Ajedrez says in Spanish. Slick with silver wrath.

Footsteps. Somewhere in the edges of his vision, feet.

“Listen, shitbags.” Ajedrez fires again, into the ground, inches from his face. He swears under his breath and chokes back a sob. “This,” She kicks him in the gut. The impact drives the air out of his lungs with a whoosh, and he flops right side up, groaning softly. He closes his eyes. “Is the least of what will happen to you if you even so much as _think_ about trying to kill me again. Understood?”

She fires again. “Get out of my sight.” Sands sees sky in blinding blue and four men running away, full tilt.

Ajedrez watches them scurry off with a darkling smirk. From where he is, if she had been wearing a skirt, he could have seen her panties. She flashes Sands a brilliant smile and crouches down to give him a peck on the cheek.

“Ta, Sweetie!” she sings, smoothing back his unruly hair from his face.

“Wait.” Sands’s voice cracks. “Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

Ajedrez walks away.

“Hey!” Sands hisses loudly in frustration. “Fuck you!” he yells at her retreating back.

And again, thin and splintering, “Fuck you!”

The overturned wheelchair is less than a foot away. Sands stares at it and then begins to sing. Loudly and off-key.

He has run out of Broadway songs and Weird Al Yankovic, and is halfway through the Backstreet Boys’ third album by the time Raul arrives to collect him. His throat is so raw by then that he tastes the faintest traces of blood lacing his words.

***

He thinks about his third arm. Wonders what has happened to it. Handy tool, that third arm. It really annoyed him when that waitress gave his little trump card away to Belini. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, to tell the truth, but some things just can’t be avoided.

He remembers the way her apologies tangled with his protests as she attacked his third arm with the washcloth. Her bewilderment when she realized that the arm had been fake. She had prodded it and picked it up, something akin to horror written in the slack red of her mouth. “ _Oh my God,_ ” she had probably thought, “ _this man has no arm._ ”

Now, he wonders if his body is still there. He knows that it’s connected to his head, he sees it, he smells it. But he feels nothing. He wonders if the rest of him has, in fact, become his third arm.

***

Ajedrez likes to play with Sands’s hands when they’re in bed. She would pick them up and spread them over her breasts, wipe them across her neck and the expanse of her flat stomach. Flick the fingers inside her, and gasp and squirm.

And Sands can’t do anything about it.

She trails red marks down the xylophone starkness of his ribs, down to his thighs, with teeth and nails. He curses her all the while.

She likes to play pretend. That it’s him doing the fucking and not her using his body parts. That he’s being gentle, that he’s still capable of enjoying it.

He tried to bite her finger off once, when she stuck it into his mouth and told him to suck. She nearly broke his jaw. She kept him in his bed and on dextrose, without Raul to clean him up, for an entire week. The room reeked to Hell and his mouth tasted like vomit.

Now, when she tells him to suck, he sucks. He sucks until he makes her scream.

Sometimes, she kisses him, and it’s tender and sweet and it makes him want to choke.

Other times, she violates his mouth, leaving him with the taste of her blood on his teeth. Those times are better.

And when it’s all done, she usually hits him and runs out of the room without a word. Once, he thought he heard her sob aloud.

***

They’ve grown used to each other. They speak to each other in tones that might be mistaken for trust, if one looks closely enough and squints sideways.

Mostly, she does the talking and he listens. He has learned to appreciate silence: the opulent intensity of a clear night, sharing a cigarette on the back porch, the familiar, comforting smell of gun oil and death.

She brings the cigarette first to her lips, and then passes it to his. He tastes her lipstick on the filter. They exhale into the crisp air and listen as the smoke dissipates.

Tonight, the crickets are louder than their heartbeats.

Between insults, they share a brief, smoke-flavored kiss.

***

It’s bath time again. The tub is filled midway with warm water. Raul arranges him on the marble changing table. He knows that Raul is now taking off Sands’s socks, even though he cannot sit up to watch. Now the pants. And then Raul comes into view again and props him up. The boy leans Sands against his chest as he peels off Sands’s shirt. Sands can smell Raul’s cheap aftershave and the sharp tang of his sweat. His skin is warm underneath Sands’s cheek. He inhales deeply right before Raul moves back and gently lays him back down to remove his catheter and his underwear. The marble is hard against the back of Sands’s head.

Raul looms up once more and slips his arms underneath Sands’s back and legs and then picks him up. He grunts softly at the weight. Pressed against his chest again, Sands can hear Raul’s rabbit-quick heartbeat and feel his breathing. Labored from the effort of supporting Sands’s spare and wasted frame. Raul carries Sands like a small child, naked and cradled in his arms, to the bathtub. He lowers Sands into the water, and Sands watches the water level rise as he is eased into the tub.

It’s like watching something else being put into the water with you.

He is leaned against the back of the tub, and Raul begins work on Sands’s face and neck. Oh yes, he can still feel that. The warm washcloth slides across the surface of his skin, and Sands does not bother to suppress the moan that flutters out of his lips. Sensation, delicious and wet and warm. Rough. Slick sandalwood soap and skin as Raul skims his hands over Sands’s face, lacing damp fingers through his hair. Raul’s face is dependably blank. All part of the job.

He works his way down until Sands stops feeling, and he has to open his eyes and watch as Raul picks up an arm, uncurls a hand, rubs the washcloth against a sunken chest. Raul purses his lips in concentration as he travels south, washing every orifice thoroughly. Probably gently, but Sands doesn’t really know for sure.

Raul has already reached Sands’s thighs when he stops and frowns. A tiny puckering of the brow. Sands follows his gaze. There is a patch of clear yellow spreading in the water. Sands rolls his eyes.

“Sorry about that,” he says without a trace of remorse.

***

“Kiss me.”

“Fuck you.”

Sands is in the drawing room of the Barillo main house with Ajedrez. It smells of Cuban tobacco and Columbian cocaine, and the floors are hardwood-dark. Raul sits in a corner, staring with blank fascination at the animal heads mounted on the walls.

Ajedrez is smoking a cigarette and the smoke swirls in gray around her ears, hovering over the curve of her brow.

Sands needs a nicotine fix so badly that if it were still possible, his hands would have been shaking.

“Kiss me.”

Smoke passing from one mouth to another, past the twine of tongues. Smoke borne on desperate breath. Smoke coating hungry lungs with tar and nicotine and fifty different cancer-causing agents, as implied by the surgeon’s general warning on the cigarette pack. Smoke seeping into veins. Into nerves. Trickling down like death.

“It’s yours, you know.” Ajedrez tosses her head back and blows that smoke into the bright and seething air, where it settles in the weave of her designer pantsuit. Sands growls in frustration. Perfectly good lung cancer put to waste.

“Just kiss me, dammit.” He has stopped calling her “bitch” and “cunt” and “shit-licking prick-envy dykefucker whore.” Maybe it’s because they’re past that now. Maybe it’s because he’s simply too sick of it to care.

“Don’t you even want to know what I’m talking about?”

Sands stares at his hands. They are stiff, curled into claws, and his arms are crossed limply on his lap. They have atrophied into fleshless sticks. There are pressure sores on his ass and the backs of his knees. He supposes he should be thankful he doesn’t feel them.

They’d probably hurt like a bitch.

“Why would I care?”

“It’s yours.”

“Shut up. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She has taken to wearing looser clothes. Sensible corporate attire; nothing skintight. Not like before.

“I’m pregnant, Sheldon.”

He scowls. “Don’t call me that.”

“I can call you whatever the fuck I want.” She takes another pull and exhales through her nose. She doesn’t snort fire like real dragons do.

“Kiss me.”

She barks out a sharp laugh and throws up her hands. There she is. Small. And then gone. She walks up to him and blocks out the light. She is a towering shadow standing over his unresponsive corpse. A backlit action figure shrouded in sunlight-amber, cigarette-made mist. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

He sighs.

“You’re pregnant and you think it’s mine.” Distinctly, infuriatingly bored; calculated to produce maximum results with minimum effort. “Now kiss me, goddammit.”

Works every time.

This time, the chair tips precariously to one side and then rolls backwards, jarring him as it lands. His arms are no longer crossed. One hand rests near his crotch, palm up. Begging. He tastes something salty-sweet-copper pooling in his mouth. He licks up the sting, the throbbing heat laced with darts. And he laughs.

***

Ajedrez’s stomach bulges like she’s been a little too liberal with the Krispy Kremes.

Sands knows better.

He is spread out on his bed, and she is taking off her clothes. Sloughing off the stark angles of her power.

He waits calmly for what he knows will come next.

If it’s his, then how old is it now? Five months? Six?

He doesn’t remember how long it has been since the Day of the Dead.

-End-


End file.
